My Amiga Blog is back in business!

Hi All,

I am pleased to say that my study is finished for the year and exams done too as of today! This of course means that I can now return to my blog again!

It's good to be back.

It has not been an easy time for me since I stopped the blogs back in July. My father in law passed away suddenly in Japan in mid August which meant stopping everything to go to Japan to arrange and attend the funeral. It has been tough for my wife to deal with, being so far away from Japan and not being able to say goodbye.

In addition I have been quite unwell over the past few months, culminating in an emergency ambulance to hospital last month and a not so fun visit to the emergency room and lots of tests and pain pills. Fortunately things are on the improve and I feel considerably better now.

I have been studying when I have not been working, juggling that with my Adelaide Retro Computing Group responsibilities, continuing to help organise and run the monthly meetings.

Unfortunately it seems that the December 2017 Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting may well be the last one. :-(

The other two organisers have decided to stop being involved from the end of this year, which leaves just me to carry on the groups activities. Given my health issues and lack of free time to take on running it by myself, I was left with no choice but to close the group down with the last meeting coming up this Friday December 8th. Hopefully we can see some of you there! I never say never of  course, and if someone is able to commit to help running the events for at least 12 months then maybe we can find a way to continue in 2018. We'll see how that pans out.

Just because I have been busy (and off air) does not mean I have been idle on all things Amiga. Far from it.

Those who follow my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts will know I have continued to muck around with my Amigas still during this period when time allowed. I also mucked around a bit with my new FM Towns system too, but that is not really relevant to this blog so...

There have been some great Amiga demos released this past few months on the Classic Amiga, both AGA and OCS/ECS demos!

I have also continued my AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition beta testing duties on the new AmigaOne A1222, but unfortunately can't discuss that since that work is covered under NDA.

I recently wanted to get the Vampire 500 V2 into my Amiga 500, but that meant fixing the Amiga 500, which has not worked since the last time I tried to use the Vampire in it...heh.

While mucking around with troubleshooting that, I reseated all the chips, and unfortunately managed to break some of the pins on the fat agnus chip when removing it! Argh! So the A500 went into storage until I could source another one.

Finally though I managed to get another one from Germany recently, so I pulled apart the A500 again to hopefully get it working:

My Amiga 500 has an Indivision ECS installed, as well as a gotek mounted on a 3D printed floppy chassis that is designed to fit the A500 case without any modifications:

Here is the missing Fat Agnus chip location:

Here it is with the new Fat Agnus chip installed:

Unfortunately though, the system still doesn't boot and work as expected. Green screens, red screens and black screens, with no idea what the issue is yet... I tried changing the CPU, the kickstart roms and even installed the Vampire 500 V2 again minus the cpu and kickstart roms but no joy as yet. Sigh, back into storage for now until I can come up with another way to fix it or replace the motherboard. Looking like that path is more likely...

So I hooked up the Amiga 600 to make sure it was still working and put it all back together as a complete system again. Here it is working great:

Back in August 2017 at the Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting, some friends and I organised a two player null modem link up between my Amiga 2000HD and a friend's Amiga 4000D. It made for a lot of fun that night, although being beaten so badly at link up two player Stunt Car Racer made me feel very embarrassed - I thought I was good at that game! At least I won at Lotus 2 and Vroom :-)

As you may recall my Amiga 2000HD was downgraded from the Vampire installation that was in it before, and now has a 68030 accelerator and 68882 FPU, 128MB fast memory, Picasso II RTG AmigaOS 3.9 BB2 Workbench, Rapid Road USB installed on X-Surf 100 network card, Prisma Megamix card, MegAChip (2MB CHIP), Oktagon SCSI card with 1GB HD (need to upgrade that still), SCSI CDROM, Indivision ECS and kickstart switcher 1.3/2.0/3.1. Whew. :-)

The Amiga 4000D here next to my A2000HD is not mine, but does have the new MNT VA2000 RTG Zorro graphics card installed, 060 and plenty of other goodies too:

Let's take a closer look at the MNT zorro RTG graphics card, with scan doubled pass through native Amiga display addon with HDMI output:

Meanwhile, reviewing on things that happened since the blog stopped, back in July 2017 I replaced the CDTV SCSI card module I bought a long time ago now (and had plenty of issues with it too) with a new one I found on Ebay. This one works a lot better and much more consistent - the old one is on the left, the new one on the right:

The new one is a lot simpler on board as you can see:

It still has the internal SCSI cable, as well as the external SCSI connector, and a SCSI card disable switch.

I hooked up my old Amiga 2000HD 52MB SCSI hard disk to it and it worked perfectly - here playing some mods using Octamed Professional v3 on the hard disk:

Of course I soon got distracted, playing Psygnosis demo CD, and some music too - the CDTV is so great for CD playback:

I also tried out my Defender of the Crown Extended Collector Edition CDTV version (not pictured).

I got into playing Xenon 2 Megablast, the CDTV version. The audio is fantastic on this compared to the original Amiga version. As a big fan of Bomb the Bass, I was glad to finally here the remixed versions of their Megablast (Hip Hop On Precinct 13) included on the CDTV version:

I received a spare Amiga 4000D from a friend in Sydney that has been tower converted (not working) with a number of interesting expansions, including the rare Picasso IV Paloma add on! :-)

This A4000D has been towerised in a Dell Inspiron desktop case from the late 1990's with plenty of modifications.

Cyberstorm 060 accelerator with 128MB memory and the optional SCSI addon installed, connected to the SCSI Hard disk and SCSI CDROM:

Also installed is a USB v1 zorro card I haven't seen before, with the Picasso IV Paloma and PVE 2.0 expansion installed:

Once the daughterboard and cards are removed (difficult job given they were mounted into a customised cage, you can see the Amiga 4000D motherboard, 16MB memory, along with a Varta battery installed. Argh! Get that off quick! (Yes, I did...)

You can see the mouse/joystick extension cables to route the A4000D ports on the motherboard to new locations on the rear of the case, since they would otherwise be completely inaccessible.

Unfortunately although this system looks impressive and powers on, there is nothing appearing on the screen and does not boot. I have stripped it of all non-essential boards and still nothing. I have tried a known working cyberstorm 060 and even the original Commodore 040 accelerator board from my own A4000D but no go...guess this one also goes into the too hard basket for now.

Just to prove that not everything Amiga related is Classic Amigas, I also installed the updated Enhancer v1.3 software package from A-EON Technology on my AmigaOne X1000.

I enjoyed greatly the updated PTP functionality in Enhancer on AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1, which allows me to transfer my photos and videos from my iPhone 7 to my X1000!

I have to say this is a really big step forward on AmigaOS 4.1 final Edition Update 1, thanks to Enhancer - it works great:

Here it is showing previews of the photos on my iPhone, allowing me to select the photos for transferring to my X1000:

Here is the transfer underway. And yes, I do have a lot of photos on my iPhone!

 I also played around with the new updated Radeon HD and Warp3D Nova drivers, enjoying the live workbench cube demonstration, which has a rotating cube with each face containing a live view of my Workbench screen. As I move the mouse and windows around, it updates on the cube in real time. Very cool:

Last but not least, I also played around with the updated E-UAE with SDL RTG support, which allows me to get full screen 1920x1080 emulated Workbench OS3.9 on my X1000:

Here is the lines highlighted in the E-UAE configuration file .uaerc I had to modify to get the RTG card support, which I could then setup through Picasso 96 under the emulated OS3.9 installation on the X1000:

Here is the resulting 1080p AmigaOS3.9 emulated Workbench screen on my X1000. I could switch easily between it and the normal AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 screen with the Amiga-M/N keyboard combination.

Well that should bring up mostly up to speed with what I have been up to during my time away. I did installed a replacement RapidRoad USB into the X-Surf 100 on my Amiga4000D system too, and finished the reinstall of the Amiga 1200 system hard disk, which I have been enjoying many 030 AGA demos as I have been typing this entry tonight!

Oh, and I recently tweaked the appearance of this Amiga blog, using a new theme Blogger has available now that looks much more modern. Still finding my way around it (having some trouble with the image on the left which doesn't auto size right for some reason) and expect to tweak it some more still. Happy to receive feedback on what works well and what doesn't.

I will hopefully do a few more blog entries before the Xmas break. Stay tuned!

Commodore Plus 4

At the Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting last month I saw some amazing demos running on a Commodore Plus/4, a machine I had never seen before. Keen to learn more and since it is Commodore related, I managed to secure myself one on Ebay, a cartridge game and an sd2iec to load games and demos on it with!



It was particularly great to be able to get one still in it's original box! The history of the Plus/4 is not a good one.

Commodore came up with this machine after the Commodore 64 was released as a low end system alternative along with the Commodore 16 which is part of the same family with less memory - 16K.
It has 64K memory, but unlike the C64 has an upgraded BASIC.

But in one of those "shake your head at Commodore management" moments, the Plus/4 was not backwardly compatible with the Commodore 64 at all. It has an "all in one" TED chip handling cpu and sound duties, which is not SID chip compatible either, with a lower quality sound capability instead. What were they thinking?



The shaking of the head continues with the realisation that this computer also has new proprietary ports incompatible with any popular C64 peripherals like Cassette players, joysticks, and cartridges! The power supply port was also different! Here is a closer look at the ports:



At least the serial port (for a 1541 disk drive) and the video output port are the same as the C64, allowing me to use the same video output cable to connect the Plus/4 to my monitor.

Included with the Plus/4 I received was the manuals, which included a software manual on how to use the 4 applications built into the Plus 4 (hence the 4 part of the naming). you can see the Plus/4 is actually smaller than the C64, and in my opinion looks considerably cooler than the C64 as well.



The cursor keys are particularly different on the Plus/4, and a lot easier to use than the ones on the C64 are. I was pleased to see it powered on first time and shows the upgraded Basic v3.5:



Here is the built in word processor on the Plus/4, a truly awful application to be honest:

As mentioned I also received an SD2IEC Commodore 1541 Disk drive emulation device, specifically a Plus 4 compatible version, as the Plus/4 version needs the proprietary cassette port connector to supply power to the unit. Here is the unit:

Close up view of the SD2IEC - it has three buttons on top that light up green/red, and also serve as a reset button and previous/next disk buttons:

Here is the SD2IEC installed on my Plus/4:

I grabbed an old 4GB SD Card and downloaded the SD2IEC software from the future is 8 bit website, and put into the root folder as per the included instructions with the SD2IEC. I could then download some Plus/4 games (.D64 and .PRG) from Plus 4 World website (great site btw) and also demos from Pouet.net.

Note that the Plus/4 can play any Commodore 16 games as well as it's own titles, but for now I am focusing on Plus/4 specific stuff. I am pleased to report that the Plus/4 SD2IEC works perfectly:

Below is the File Browser running on the Plus/4. I can use the cursor keys to navigate to the Plus4 folder where I put all my games and demos to try out:

I was particularly surprised to see some recent games made for the Plus/4, 2017 even! Here is some of the games I tried out, which worked perfectly on the SD2IEC on the Plus/4:

This game, Android 2, was written in 2014 and surprisingly fun and difficult:

The next game I tried was Adventures in Time from 2010, and I was pleasantly surprised as this game was a lot of fun - a difficult platform game:

Here is an arkanoid clone game called Arthur Noid, but unfortunately I don't have a Plus/4 joystick to play it! I have ordered a C64 joystick converter for the Plus 4 which should solve this issue once it arrives, but it did shorten my game testing since I could only play games that used the keyboard...

 
So, moving onto to the demoscene on the Plus/4, I had mixed success running some of the demos using the SD2IEC, much like I did on the C64 too. However I can't use the 1541UII on the Plus/4 as the cartridge port is not compatible!

Nonetheless I got to enjoy some good demos nonetheless, some of which I recognised from the Adelaide Retro Computing group meeting last month:

The effects are quite impressive indeed for such a machine, and I am glad to be able to enjoy these demos anytime!

The demoscene never cease to amaze me with what they can do with old systems in 2017!

Last but not least I also received a brand new in box cartridge game called "Jack Attack" for the Plus/4, which I wanted to try out:

The Plus/4 cartridges are a odd shape but actually look kinda cool:

Here is the game running, but unfortunately it needs a joystick so....

I thought I would cover the Commodore Plus/4 here as it was released while the Commodore 64 was on sale, and even though it failed for good reasons I already covered earlier in this post, I have enjoyed finding out more about this machine and seeing what it can do!